How the Tub Break in ‘Marty Supreme’ Explains the Safdie Touch

Marty Mauser is a blur, yet another Safdie protagonist running for his life. The overconfident, abrasive, relentlessly ambitious tenement Jew is nearly out of bridges to burn. He’s being chased through the Lower East Side by the NYPD, penniless and in desperate need of a shower because he just buried himself in an alley dumpster abutting a Chinese restaurant to evade a few cops. Marty’s next stop is a rundown Garment District shithole hotel, “the Halsey on 28th,” overrun with lowlifes, where he talks his way into the cheapest possible room with his friend Wally for a few hours. There, they’ll lay low before heading to New Jersey to make corned beef out of some simian-browed marks, hustling them in table tennis for the few hundred dollars Marty needs to get to Japan for a tournament. There’s only one catch: Marty’s told he can’t use the bathtub in their fifth-floor hotel room.

What happens next in Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s visceral thrill ride of a genre mutant, is both obvious and shocking. It’s a signature of the kind of film he’s all but mastered, a Safdie Touch that originated in the movies he made with his brother Benny.

Marty (Timothée Chalamet) isn’t a great listener, so there’s a chance he never hears or actively ignores the instruction from the “front desk.” He jumps into the tub and, almost exactly an hour into the film, sends it through the floor, into the bathroom of the room just below his. The tub falls on a dog named Moses and the arm of a dog-loving gangster named Ezra (Abel Ferrara), who is holding a bag of cash, which ramps up the pace and anxiety levels of the film for the rest of its runtime.

The arm break and its exposed bone, drenched in blood, are shown graphically. So is the collective shock, pain, alarm, disgust, and concern displayed by the moaning Ezra, his dog, and the crowd that forms: the cops, the hotel clerk, a wet and naked Marty trying to tourniquet the arm with a belt, and the many onlookers who all have what can only be called perfect 1952 Garment District faces. There are several conversations happening at once, with multiple parties ignoring each other, each concerned with their own agenda as their annoyance mounts. Moments like these might be called Safdie-core.

It's the sort of scene the Safdies have turned into a genre unto itself over the course of their last three films: 2017’s Good Time, 2019’s Uncut Gems, and now Josh’s first solo effort, Marty Supreme. They have inspired imitators—one of which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2024—but none have captured the specific level of giddy, panic-inducing intensity only the brothers can achieve again and again.

“Each Safdie movie is a kind of heist that operates as a torture chamber.”

Each Safdie movie is a kind of heist that operates as a torture chamber. Good Time treated this idea literally, with its lead focused on robbing a bank. In Uncut Gems, it’s a matter of staying alive long enough for a six-leg parlay to hit. Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie has said, is a “heist of fate.” Its protagonist has to beat odds that grow longer and longer to get to Japan and achieve his dream of becoming the greatest table tennis player on earth.

On the surface, these are simple stories; the key lies in their meticulous architecture, in the writing and direction, in their discomfiting scores and sound design. Taken together, they achieve a tone that may not be entirely new to cinema, but here, spread across an entire movie, a marathon run at the pace of a sprint, is a remix, a blowing out and blowing up of anything similar that came before (yes, even Scorsese).

The opening heist in Good Time goes wrong, and the cognitively impaired Nick Nikas (Benny Safdie) is arrested. The opening credits roll, the now-standard, brilliant, propulsive Daniel Lopatin score swells, and we see a nightmare vision of New York City’s Rikers Island, where Nick is being held, making the audience feel how urgently Connie (Robert Pattinson) needs to spring his brother. The ambient prisoner crowd noise eclipses all other sound, the handheld camera work is shaky, and the cutting happens fast. A fight breaks out, cops spray mace into the cell indiscriminately from a device that looks like a fire extinguisher, and you feel as if you are in a Rikers Island bullpen.

This is how Sadie-core excels. The brothers’ films are full of cross-conversations, digital noise or abrasive sound, the incessant buzz of a door or beep of a malfunctioning manual-entry credit card processor, a ringing phone, a barking dog, a honking horn, a siren, the relentless diegetic cacophony of the city where much of their films take place. They are experts at getting plates spinning and walls closing in, of employing multiple combustible elements at the “perfect” inopportune moment. They are conducting symphonies of chaos.

“They are experts at getting plates spinning and walls closing in.”

“It’s every man for himself where I come from,” Marty says at one point Marty Supreme. This explains the Safdie cinema of brutality and betrayal, extreme worlds willing to enact profound cruelty on their characters. Their schlemiel bookies will take making a point a step further than necessary, their dopehead assholes will force a security guard to chug liquid acid, they will publicly paddle your ass and make you kiss traif after you’ve been publicly humiliated, all in the service of a nihilistic, sociopathic vision of humanity. They also introduce allegorical mystic touches that heighten their relatively small-stakes stories, imbuing them with ambiguous biblical meaning: a scumbag thief who was a dog in a previous life, a Jewish African opal that lends magical basketball properties, 350-year-old vampires. It’s the Coen Brothers’ agnostic, absurdist, callous Midwest universe emptied of answers, but raised and remixed a generation later in Giuliani's ethnically blended, impoverished outer boroughs, full of resourceful immigrants obsessed with Necro and the Knicks.

The sensory and human sums of these parts are disorienting and upsetting and occur in a frame that feels like you’re watching these unbearably intense moments playing out in real time. Here is the key when you watch other films that attempt to replicate this style and tone: Safdie non-professional actors are employed perfectly, set up by the director to succeed. Josh Safdie has spoken at length about how important casting is to him (he has said he signed off on every extra and not only cast the many speaking roles in Marty, no matter how minor, but added speaking roles on set), and how conveying the total reality of every part, with detailed backstories, is essential to getting the performances he needs. Both brothers have discussed the lengths to which they’ll go to simulate authenticity.

There’s a reason every director doesn't cast a bunch of random people without acting experience for speaking roles in a film: At some point, you will feel their lack of experience in the performance, as you might if you closely watched the too-slow, airless, clunky, stagey stumble across Brighton Beach in winter that makes up the second act of the aforementioned 2024 Best Picture winner, Anora. Nor is the solution making Regina King a hard-ass corrupt detective, giving Matt Smith a Mohawk, or putting Liev Schreiber in payes if your goal is capturing “the electricity in the air” in New York in the late ’90s, as Darren Aronofsky attempted in his own largely unsuccessful Brooklyn caper earlier this year, Caught Stealing. The product feels sterile and unconvincing no matter how detailed the set, the faces too recognizable, too polished, no matter how gifted the actor. The superpower is in the non-professional actor interacting with the movie star and the director coaxing out of both a performance that maintains the painstakingly created reality of the mise-en-scène. This is The Safdie Touch.

“Imitators have learned all the wrong lessons from moments like the tub break.”

Josh and Ronald Bronstein's writing must also be commended. Imitators have learned all the wrong lessons from moments like the tub break, believing it’s the visceral appeal and shock of the moment that makes their films so distinct and memorable. What they miss is that the tub break is a load-bearing plot point. In the film, Marty says, “My life is the product of all the decisions I’ve had to make.” And that feels truer in a Safdie movie than it does in virtually any other. Their screenplays are branching logic trees in which these decisions compound, creating the next corner to fight out of, and are followed through to their conclusions. A broken magnetic door in a jewelry shop can serve as a crucial recurring character in a film. It is what sustains the anything-is-possible tension that allows you to find the tub break both shocking and completely believable. The tub break is what introduces us to Ezra and his dog and their respective injuries, which will gradually hijack the film’s second act.

It’s an echo of a moment like when Connie breaks the (very) wrong guy out of the hospital in Good Time, or the rogue thugs Arno (Eric Bogosian) hires to collect a debt from Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) in Uncut Gems, or a faded starlet being crushed by a sudden bad review and abandoning a plan the plot was hinging on. These are entirely predictable events committed by desperate and/or not particularly bright people that rarely happen in narrative on the pretext of “likability” and shit like the idea of a finely calibrated (or sloppily ripped-off) story arc. These moments highlight that, in film, there is a crucial fine line between sudden narrative convenience and action that actually feels random and like real life, sold by filmmaking obsessed with its simulation. Safdie-core is the ability to divine that difference.

By the second hour of Marty Supreme, Ezra is gone, having been gunned down by Penn Jillette, who plays an unrecognizable but of course perfectly calibrated psychopath living on a farm in the Safdies’ nightmare vision of vision of a very white, racist, remote Garden State in boonies far from the Lower East Side. Little money has been exchanged, but Marty has been bonded to his baby’s mother, Rachel, who has been held at knifepoint and had her womb threatened with a hammer. Marty has clearly been scared and humbled by the experience (and several others) by the time he gets to Japan, kissing the requisite ass and generous in his eventual victory over his opponent.

The shocking, visceral rush we experienced at the Halsey Hotel is far behind us, but to paraphrase the work of another writer/director Josh Safdie may be competing with for a Best Director Oscar next year, someone whose catalog was clearly instructive to him: The tub is gone, but the distraction is still here.

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